Remko Tanis

“No Begging” sign on an elevated walkway at a Cartier store in the financial center of Lujiazui, Pudong, Shanghai, China.
1090978
research-article2022
NLFXXX10.1177/10957960221090978New Labor Forum XX(X)Zhang
What’s Really behind China’s
“Common Prosperity” Program?
Yueran Zhang1
Keywords
common prosperity, capitalism, China, redistribution, state
In the summer of 2021, the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) announced a call for a comprehen-
sive policy program to achieve “common pros-
perity” (gongtong fuyu), which instantly
attracted wide attention from the domestic pub-
lic as well as China observers overseas.
Allegedly aimed to significantly reduce China’s
economic inequality, boost mass income levels,
and nurture a large and prosperous middle
class, this “common prosperity” program has
been seen by many as marking a progressive,
redistributive, and egalitarian turn in the coun-
try’s economic and social policy regime.
Whereas the substance of this program is still
in the making, so far it has been most closely
associated with a notable strengthening of the
state’s disciplinary and punitive hand toward
big capital. The announcement of “common
prosperity” took place amidst a series of high-
profile, dramatic actions targeting some of
China’s major tech giants for reasons including
financial risk prevention, data security, and anti-
monopoly. In November 2020, just days before
the Ant Group—a major financial platform and
spin-off of the tech conglomerate Alibaba—was
about to launch its initial public stock offering
(IPO), the Chinese state, citing regulatory con-
cerns, unexpectedly called off what would have
been the world’s largest IPO in history.1 The Ant
Group was ordered to go through an organiza-
tional overhaul in 2021, which brought it much
closer under the regulatory grip of state agencies
including the People’s Bank of China.2 In mid-
2021, the ride-hailing giant Didi received a
range of regulatory inspections and harsh penal-
ties from cybersecurity, anti-trust, tax, and
transport regulators (with its flagship app
banned from app stores in China) after it dis-
obeyed the state authority’s subtly
New Labor Forum
2022, Vol. 31(2) 62­–70
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communicated order and filed for an IPO in the
United States.3 Also in 2021, the state signifi-
cantly tightened regulations on entire economic
sectors including real estate and private tutor-
ing4—almost decimating the latter—which hit
their leading companies particularly hard.
Indeed, “preventing the disorderly expansion of
capital” has been one of the signature slogans of
the official “common prosperity” rhetoric.5
Policy content beyond such head-on disciplin-
ing of capital has remained vague so far. For
example, although the central government
announced its intention to enact a new property
tax in October 2021, when, why, how, and to
whom this would apply are all unresolved.
The policy . . . could be understood
as a necessary technocratic fix for
. . . a weak domestic market . . . and
a perceived “demographic crisis”
caused by low birth rates.
The policy program’s emphasis on economic
equality and curbing capital’s power could be
understood as a necessary technocratic fix for
two fundamental challenges: a weak domestic
market that has so far failed to spur economic
growth, and a perceived “demographic crisis”
caused by low birth rates. But these important
structural factors alone cannot explain the polit-
ical character of the state’s endeavors, particu-
larly why they have prioritized disciplining
capital in such a confrontational manner. I will
argue that this is because the state has been both
1
University of California, Berkeley, USA
Corresponding Author:
Yueran Zhang, yueranzhang@berkeley.edu
64 New Labor Forum 31(2)
strategically responding to a powerful and visi-
bly growing anti-capital sentiment across
Chinese society and preemptively dispossess-
ing big capital of any major leverage that could
cause the party-state political unease in the
future. The fundamental shortcoming of the
“common prosperity” program is as well a
political one: a paternalistic attitude toward
ordinary citizens, including the working class,
that sees them as recipients of state goodwill
but not agents capable of demanding change
through action and organizing.
A Technocratic Fix?
China’s economic inequality has substantially
increased since the country embarked on post-
Mao reforms. One authoritative study found
that by 2007, China’s income GINI index—a
conventional measure of a society’s income
inequality—had surpassed 0.48, which meant
China “had entered the ranks of the world’s
most unequal nations in terms of income distri-
bution.”6 While income inequality slightly
decreased between 2008 and 2015, it again fell
on a slowly rising trend thereafter. The rise in
the wealth GINI index has been even more
striking, from 0.49 in 2002, to 0.63 in 2014, to
0.7 in 2018.7 Social scientists have long argued
that the inadequate share by the popular strata
of the nation’s wealth has limited their spending
power and the growth of the domestic market.8
This was not a big problem for China’s
economy when it could rely on exports and
investment in infrastructure and real estate as
engines of growth. But as these economic driv-
ers started to lose steam in recent years, the
problem of insufficient consumption became
more deeply felt. In 2018, “consumption down-
grading” (xiaofei jiangji) became one of the
biggest trending phrases on social media, refer-
ring to a growing phenomenon of belt tighten-
ing, curbing unnecessary expenditures and
looking for cheaper substitute goods as a result
of stagnant or worsening income prospects.
As China came out of the pandemic lock-
down in 2020, consumption growth has been
much weaker than expected, despite various
incentives local governments provided to
encourage consumer spending.9 In the mean-
time, trade wars in preceding years and new
pandemic-related fragilities in the export mar-
ket convinced China’s policymakers of the
necessity to pivot to domestic consumption as
the main anchor of the economy, captured by
the shift to emphasize a “dual circulation eco-
nomic strategy” (shuang xunhuan) in 2020.
This strategy refers to a growing reliance on the
domestic market and indigenous innovation, or
“internal circulation,” as the major driver of
economic growth, without totally abandoning
the export market and cross-border technologi-
cal exchange, or “external circulation.”10
The economic challenge coincides with a
widespread panic about China’s low birth rates.
Analysts have for years warned about China’s
unsustainably low birth rates and the pending
crisis of population aging, but the results of the
seventh national census released in 2021 were
even more alarming than expected, leading
many to claim that China might enter population
decline before the end of this decade.11 Census
results showed the annual population growth
rate over the last decade was a mere 0.53 per-
cent, slightly lower than the previous decade.
Only 12 million babies were born in 2020, down
from almost 18 million in 2016, the year after
the partial relaxation of the one-child policy that
allowed married couples to have up to two chil-
dren. China’s total fertility rate—the average
number of children a woman is expected to have
over her lifetime—stood at 1.3, among the low-
est in the world. In 2020, those aged sixty or
above comprised 13.5 percent of the population,
a dramatic increase from 8 percent a decade ago.
In response to this “demographic crisis,” in
2021, the central state further relaxed the maxi-
mum number of children married couples could
have to three, and local governments rushed to
announce an imaginative range of incentives
and benefits, including privileged access to pub-
lic housing, preferential loans, and generous
parental leave. China’s policymakers expressed
a determination to tackle the fact that economic
hardship and the lack of social support are major
reasons why China’s young generation is going
on something like a “birth strike.” At least in
official rhetoric, this could be partially addressed
through measures of the “common prosperity”
program such as greater access to affordable
childcare, expansion of public housing, and
child tax credit provisions.12
Zhang 65
A worrying development, though, is that
these policies have been taking place in con-
junction with a state-promoted conservative
turn—in both rhetoric and policy—that empha-
sizes heteronormative family values and wom-
en’s domestic responsibilities. The state
recently instituted a mandatory “cooling off”
rule that requires couples who are mutually
seeking a divorce to wait for thirty days before
finalizing it. The official Women’s Federation
has been calling on women to attend to the
domestic sphere.13 Government incentives to
have more children so far have failed to address
gender inequalities in the workplace and at
home, with many feminist advocates worrying
that policies like more generous maternity leave
risk increasing workplace gender discrimina-
tion that the state is willing to ignore to encour-
age women to stay at home and raise children.
[There is] evidence that more and
more youth in China are identifying
themselves as “workers” in the
classical Marxian sense . . .
While some policymakers were likely
swayed by such technocratic rationale support-
ing a policy shift toward inequality reduction
and economic redistribution, these consider-
ations alone cannot explain why the “common
prosperity” program has so far been headlined
by disciplining and punishing big capital. The
answer, as I will show, has to be sought in the
realm of political dynamics—in the state’s
desire to both consolidate popular support and
preempt political threat. At the same time, as I
will argue, the state has embarked on an increas-
ingly repressive project that, in both “soft” and
“hard” ways, dispossesses ordinary citizens and
grassroots movements of the ability to them-
selves demand change and concession from the
state and capital. A “progressive” program
developing alongside growing political authori-
tarianism might appear paradoxical, but it ulti-
mately reflects the party-state’s imperative to
guard its own power, invalidating any claim
that the “common prosperity” program has a
genuinely progressive character.
The Politics of Common
Prosperity
Many observers, including those in China who
self-identify as leftist, have noted that Chinese
society, especially the young generation, is
experiencing a leftward turn. Although there is
no solid public opinion data demonstrating this,
its manifestations seem to be everywhere.14
Marx’s Capital and The Selected Works of Mao
Zedong are becoming popular readings among
the young, in a way that has not been the case
for the past three decades: according to one sta-
tistic, the sales of The Selected Works of Mao
Zedong has continuously increased over the
past five years and doubled between 2019 and
2020.15 Multiple friends of mine who teach in
China’s universities and interact daily with col-
lege students say the main driver of this trend is
not state pressure for compulsory reading of
“red” classics, but indeed young people’s surge
of interest in such texts. In 2020 and 2021, sev-
eral catchphrases went viral online, especially
among the youth: one was “dagongren” (mean-
ing “laborer”), which many young people use
to label themselves as part of the laboring
masses; another is “tangping” (“lying flat”),
referring to their (mostly implicit) resistance to
their bosses’ call on them to work hard16; yet
another is “gongren yeye” (literally meaning
“you should call us workers ‘grandpa’”), used
to express frustration with the lack of social sta-
tus and respect they experience as workers, par-
ticularly vis-à-vis their bosses. These discursive
phenomena can indeed be taken as evidence
that more and more youth in China are identify-
ing themselves as “workers” in the classical
Marxian sense—part of a proletariat being
exploited and oppressed by capitalists—and
suggest some kind of embryonic class con-
sciousness in the making. Correspondingly,
young people have been painting “capital” and
“capitalists” in a negative light. One example
often cited by media analysts is the dramatic
turn of public opinion against Jack Ma, founder
of Alibaba and one of China’s signature private
capitalists. Within a span of three or four years,
the sentiment toward him on major social media
platforms such as weibo and bilibili has shifted
66 New Labor Forum 31(2)
from awe and adoration—with many social
media users calling him “papa”—to deeply felt
hatred, with many calling him “vampire” and
arguing that he should be hanged, following his
defense of information technology (IT) compa-
nies’ long work hours and condescending com-
ments toward women in the workplace.17 In
another telling example, observers were startled
by the number of people online who celebrated
the passing of Zuo Hui, founder of Homelink
and Beike, two of China’s major real estate bro-
kerage companies, who died of cancer at fifty
years of age in May 2021.18
[The anti-capital turn] is not the
work of state indoctrination but is
rooted in people’s experiences with
the objective reality of Chinese
capitalism . . .
I personally have reservations calling this
public opinion shift a leftward turn, both
because the term “left” (besides conjuring up
figures like Marx and Mao and their texts)
means very different things to different people
in China and because the political content of
this turn is ambiguous at best: some people
have developed an explicit critique of capital-
ism as a social system and its political appara-
tus (i.e., the state), whereas most have not;
some hold visions and ideas about an alterna-
tive social order they would want to embrace,
whereas most do not; some are aware of the
importance of workers’ collective struggles as
the key mechanism of progressive social
change, whereas most are not. What these peo-
ple are united by, therefore, are not a set of
elaborate political views but rather a strong
sense of anger, disgust, and frustration with
their material suffering at the hands of capitalis-
tic actors. It is therefore more accurate to call
this an “anti-capital”— rather than “leftward”
or “anti-capitalist”—turn.
It is important to reiterate that this turn is not
the work of state indoctrination but is rooted in
people’s experiences with the objective reality
of Chinese capitalism, which has entered a new
stage. As economic growth slows down and
room for new profit-making activities shrinks,
capitalistic competition increasingly takes the
form of cutting labor costs, resulting in stagnant
wages and benefits, abrupt layoffs, fewer pros-
pects for upward career mobility, heightened
workplace competition, increased workplace
surveillance, and worsening labor conditions.
Many of these things have been experienced by
manufacturing and low-wage service-sector
workers for decades, but in recent years they
have become much more prevalent in tradition-
ally “middle-class” sectors such as IT, in which
workers who used to see themselves as profes-
sionals and their jobs as a path toward prosper-
ity now increasingly recognize their workplace
experience as one of exploitation. This has led
to some high-profile organizing efforts to air
grievances, share information, and build soli-
darity, such as the anti-996 initiative organized
by IT workers in 2019 to expose the extent of
mandatory overtime requirements and the
Worker Lives Matter campaign, launched in
2021 to share information on employers’ behav-
ior and working conditions across companies
on an embryonic organizing platform. By
loudly demonstrating their discontent through
collective organizing, IT workers have made
themselves a prime example of middle-class
sectors participating in the anti-capital shift.
. . . “middle-class” sectors such as
IT . . . increasingly recognize their
workplace experience as one of
exploitation.This has led to some
high-profile organizing efforts . . .
Meanwhile, the Chinese economy is increas-
ingly dominated by private monopoly capital,
particularly platform giants (conglomerates
whose core business models rely on facilitating
transactions on digital platforms), with their
influence penetrating almost every walk of life.
In 2019, the top three e-commerce platforms—
Alibaba, JD, and Pinduoduo—accounted for 80
percent of all online purchases in China.19 As a
result, a growing segment of the population is
being squeezed by monopoly capital not only as
workers but also (sometimes simultaneously)
as tenants, debtors, consumers, small investors,
and small business owners who are either
driven out of existence by platforms or are
dependent on them for survival. As capital
reveals its predatory and rentier character in
Zhang 67
spheres beyond the workplace, it is now much
easier for people to connect the dots and trace
their everyday hardship to capital. She
Zongming, a famous media commentator,
noted in July 2021 that the view of capital as
having not only “original sin” but also “com-
prehensive sin” is getting extremely popular
among the young.20 As people’s concrete expe-
riences with a changing Chinese capitalism
drive the growth of anti-capital sentiment, the
state-mandated pedagogy of Marxist orthodoxy
also provides people with a vocabulary to make
sense of their experiences, express grievances,
and identify “capital” as the culprit.
. . . [R]iding on the wave of anti-
capital popular sentiment also
helps mitigate the state’s own sense
of insecurity vis-à-vis the platform
giants . . .
The state’s disciplining of capital could be
seen, in part, as a response to this sentiment. I
am not arguing that grassroots sentiment pushes
the state to act, but that this broad and emotion-
ally energetic sentiment has created a precious
political opportunity for the state to consolidate
popular support by posing as a benign regulator,
preventing the worst excesses of capital.
Because of the politically ambiguous nature of
the anti-capital shift, many of those angered at
capital are intuitively poised to rally around a
state that comes across as “fighting hard against
capital.” So far, the Chinese government has
exploited this opportunity quite artfully, with its
slogan of “preventing the disorderly expansion
of capital” and disciplinary actions drawing
high praise from the public, the effect of which
was further amplified by negotiations between
China’s healthcare authority and pharmaceuti-
cal companies—heavily publicized by state
media in December 2021—in which the former
aggressively pushed the latter to cut the prices
of their drugs to be included in public healthcare
insurance coverage. The net result has been a
popular perception of the state as standing up
for the “people”—a perception that neglects
how the state organizes and reproduces the con-
ditions of existence of capitalism as a mode of
production.
Of course, riding on the wave of anti-capital
popular sentiment also helps mitigate the state’s
own sense of insecurity vis-à-vis the platform
giants, which hold the power to effect visible
changes in the lives of millions of highly depen-
dent customers who also generate a vast amount
of valuable data. At least in theory, this, along
with the scale of their operations, provides the
companies with potential sources of leverage
that could be used to demand concessions from
the state. And the companies’ interlocking net-
works and cross-sector expansion multiply
such leverage: for example, Alibaba and
Tencent, China’s two leading tech companies,
hold sizable shares in other major companies in
social media, video streaming, ride-hailing,
electronics, logistics, retail, and more.21 Making
sure these companies fall further into the orbit
of state regulation and dispossessing them of
such leverage are thus of paramount impor-
tance for the party-state.
The Missing Agents of Change
Meanwhile, the party-state has shown abso-
lutely no interest in empowering grassroots
actors to organize and demand progressive
change. On the contrary, since Xi Jinping took
power in 2012, the state has significantly nar-
rowed the space for self-organizing. The labor
movement has been one of its main casualties.
[T]he state has significantly
narrowed the space for self-
organizing.The labor movement has
been one of its main casualties.
Ever since 2013, and particularly since 2018,
the state has developed much more sophisti-
cated methods of surveilling and containing
workers’ collective actions; devoted much more
attention to identifying, prosecuting, and neu-
tralizing leaders who emerged from collective
action and self-organizing; left much smaller
room for labor non-governmental organizations
which in the past had played a role, however
small, in facilitating workers’ action and orga-
nizing; and harshly repressed left-wing stu-
dents, activists, and intellectuals. In the second
half of 2021, soon after “common prosperity”
68 New Labor Forum 31(2)
was announced as a top priority, a left-wing
labor researcher was detained on charges of
“subverting state power,”22 and the Worker
Lives Matter campaign was shut down two
weeks after its launch. Grassroots self-organiz-
ing, particularly working-class self-organizing,
seems to be seen by the state as a major (poten-
tial) threat.
This calls into question the progressive
character of the “common prosperity” pro-
gram. It suggests that the party-state’s funda-
mental concern is to protect its own power, by
consolidating popular support and preemp-
tively disempowering grassroots challenges.
The political logic behind it is deeply paternal-
istic, one that says to citizens, “I will give you
good things, but you won’t be able to demand
them through action.”
To some extent, this resembles what politi-
cal scientist Manfred Elfstrom has shown in his
recent book Workers and Change in China:
Resistance, Repression, Responsiveness: over
the past decade or so, the Chinese state has
responded to workers’ contentious activity by
both granting material concessions and tighten-
ing the space for collective organizing.23 In the
“common prosperity” era, the state is going
beyond merely granting concessions to actively
mobilizing popular support by portraying itself
as a protector of citizens’ well-being against
capital, while elevating the political tightening
to a new level. One may even speculate that the
Chinese state was concerned that the burgeon-
ing anti-capital sentiment, if left to its own
devices, could develop the kind of clarity, radi-
calism, and agency that eventually feed into
independent grassroots and labor movements.
Thus, channeling an “immature” anti-capital
sentiment into a pro-state one, while suppress-
ing independent organizing, makes much sense
for the state.
The state is certainly able to demand that big
capital play by the rules, and treat workers, con-
sumers, debtors, renters, and small investors a
bit better, especially if this wins it political
credit. It can enact more redistributive taxation
and devote a larger share of public spending to
certain social provisions—although policymak-
ers have also loudly denounced “welfarism,” by
which they mean welfare provisions so gener-
ous as to encourage “laziness,” something they
ignorantly and condescendingly associate with
Latin America.24 Some segments of Chinese
society might indeed benefit materially from
such measures. However, without strong popu-
lar sectors—especially a strong working
class—able to hold the state accountable and
act as a counterweight to capital, material gains
are highly subject to reversal. On the other
hand, it is exactly this public passiveness,
which the state endeavors to maintain, that
ensures capital’s structural domination over the
popular sectors, however much the state disci-
plines particular capitalistic enterprises.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of inter-
est with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iD
Yueran Zhang https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1324
-400X
Notes
 1. Emily Feng, “Regulators Squash Giant Ant
Group IPO,” NPR, November 3, 2020, available
at https://www.npr.org/2020/11/03/930799521/
regulators-squash-giant-ant-ipo.
 2. Yang Jing, “Jack Ma’s Ant Group Bows to
Beijing with Company Overhaul,” The Wall
Street Journal, April 12, 2021, available at
https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/
jack-ma-s-ant-group-bows-to-beijing-with-
company-overhaul-11618249872981.html.
 3. “China Is Said to Weigh Unprecedented Didi
Penalty after IPO,” Bloomberg News, July 22,
2021, available at https://www.bloomberg.
com/news/articles/2021-07-22/china-is-said-
to-weigh-unprecedented-penalty-for-didi-af-
ter-ipo#:~: text=Beijing%20is%20likely%20
to%20impose, and%20customers%2 C%20
the%20people%20said.
 4. Before the regulatory tightening, China’s
private tutoring industry was estimated
to be valued around $120 billion. Eleanor
Albert, “China Targets the Private Tutoring
Sector,” The Diplomat, July 29, 2021,
Zhang 69
available at https://thediplomat.com/2021/07/
china-targets-the-private-tutoring-sector/.
  5. “China Says Move to Curb Disorderly Expansion
of Capital Has Shown Initial Results,” Reuters,
August 30, 2021, available at https://www
.reuters.com/article/china-economy-idUSKBN-
2FV0UR; “China’s Common Prosperity Boon
to World,” Xinhua News, December 21, 2021,
available at http://www.news.cn/english/2021-
12/21/c_1310386179.htm.
  6. Li Shi et al, 2013, Analysis of Changes in China’s
Income Inequality—Research on Income
Distribution of Chinese Residents IV (Zhongguo
Shouru Chaju Biandong Fenxi—Zhongguo
Jumin Shouru Fenpei Yanjiu IX) (Beijing:
People’s Press), available at http://www.ciid-
bnu.org/news/202010/20201018002211706.
html.
 7. “Interview with Li Shi: The Challenge of
Common Prosperity is to Make Income
High and Inequality Low (Zhuanfang Li Shi:
Gongtong Fuyu, Nan zai ‘Shouru yao Gao,
Chaju yao Xiao’).” Nandu Guancha, October
26, 2021, available at https://nanduguancha.cn/
home/news/detail/id/4803/cate_id/0.html.
 8. See, for example, Ho-Fung Hung, “Growth
Towns,” Phenomenal World, November 12,
2021, available at https://www.phenomenal-
world.org/analysis/evergrande/; Matthew Klein
and Michael Pettis, Trade Wars Are Class Wars
(London: Yale University Press, 2020).
 9. Gabriel Crossley and Kevin Gao, “China
Worries about Lagging Consumption as
Broader Economy Shakes Off COVID,”
Reuters, January 20, 2021, available at https://
www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-
consumption-idUSKBN29P0WB; Eustance
Huang, “Weak Consumption is a ‘major prob-
lem’ for China’s Recovery, says Analytics
Firm,” CNBC, June 10, 2021, available at
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/10/weak-con-
sumption-is-problem-for-china-recovery-says-
analytics-firm.html; Stella Yifan Xie, “China’s
Economic Activity Slowed in November on
Property Slump, Weak Consumption,” The Wall
Street Journal, December 15, 2021, available
at https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-econo
mic-activity-slowed-in-november-on-property-
slump-weak-consumption-11639551530.
10. Frank Tang, “What Is China’s Dual Circulation
Economic Strategy and Why Is It Important?”
South China Morning Post, November 19,
2020, available at https://www.scmp.com/
economy/china-economy/article/3110184/
what-chinas-dual-circulation-economic-strat-
egy-and-why-it.
11. See BBC’s report in Chinese on China’s Seventh
Census here, available at https://www.bbc.com/
zhongwen/simp/chinese-news-57097082.
12. See, for example, Premier Li Keqiang and
Vice Premier Sun Chunlan’s comments along
those lines at a work conference, available at
http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2021-07/27/con-
tent_5627789.htm.
13. See, for example, the Women’s Federation’s call
issued on the occasion of the 2020 International
Women’s Day, available at https://bjnews.com.
cn/detail/158365301214794.html.
14. Wang Rui, “Fed Up with Capitalism, Young
Chinese Brush Up on ‘Das Kapital,’” Sixth
Tone, December 7, 2020, available at https://
www.sixthtone.com/news/1006523/fed-up-
with-capitalism%2C-young-chinese-brush
-up-on-das-kapital.
15. This news article in Chinese published at DW
News describes Chinese youth’s growing inter-
est in reading leftist classics, including The
Selected Works of Mao Zedong, available at
https://www.dwnews.com/中国/60241181/中
国全面左转冷静看待悄然兴起的读毛选热.
16. Meagan Day, “China’s Downwardly Mobile
Millennials Are Throwing in the Towel,”
Jacobin, June 25, 2021, available at https://
jacobinmag.com/2021/06/chinese-students-
white-collar-workers-millennials-lying-flat-
tang-ping.
17. See, for example, https://theinitium.com/
article/20210412-opinion-alibaba-jack-
ma-anti-trust for a vivid account of the turn of
public opinion against Jack Ma.
18. See https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forwa
rd_12784387 for a media commentary on the
public reaction to Zuo Hui’s passing.
19. Data recorded at https://ecommercguide.com/
guides/ecommerce-in-china-stats-and-trends/.
20. She Zongming’s commentary piece in which
he makes this observation could be found at
https://scholarsupdate.hi2net.com/news.asp?
NewsID=30700. Although She’s personal atti-
tude toward the popularity of the anti-capital
sentiment is unfairly derisive, his observation
that a large segment of Chinese youth view
capital as having “comprehensive sin” is largely
accurate.
21. See https://news/stcn/com/sd/202011/t202011
11_2521886.html for a breakdown of Alibaba’s
and Tencent’s share-holding in other major
companies.
70 New Labor Forum 31(2)
22. See https://www.scmp.com/news/china/arti-
cle/3148386/fang-ran-haunting-case-hong-
kong-labour-rights-researcher-held-china for a
news report on this particular case of detention.
23. Manfred Elfstrom, Workers and Change
in China: Resistance, Repression and
Responsiveness (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2021).
24. For example, Han Wenxiu, vice director of
the CCP’s Central Office on Economic and
Financial Affairs, commented on “common
prosperity” along those lines in August 2021,
available at http://m.cyol.com/gb/arti-
cles/2021-08/26/content_Y7PwAHmpZ.html.
Author Biography
Yueran Zhang is a PhD candidate in Sociology at
the University of California, Berkeley. His broad
academic interest is in political economy, the politics
of class, and comparative studies of capitalism and
socialism.